This is the class blog for Eng 1102 at GA Tech called "Fiction, Human Rights, and Social Responsibility." The purpose of this blog is to extend our discussion beyond the classroom and to become aware of human rights issues that exist in the world today and how technology has played a role in either solving or aggravating them. Blogs will be a paragraph long (250 words) and students will contribute once every three weeks according to class number. Entries must be posted by Friday midnight.

Friday, November 8, 2013

Social Media hellping to opress women around the world

We all heard how social media helped rights
activists spread there ideas across fairly quickly and provoke peoples
response, for example the Egyptian revolution where Egyptian citizens were able
to take down the regime that ruled for years in Egypt by using social media to
call thousand of people to group together and protest. But can there be a
negative side of social media and human rights? Can it help certain governments
oppress vulnerable populations? The answer is definitely yes. In Saudi Arabia
there are reports of women being arrested for comments or statuses they post on
social media. Oppressive regimes understand that through social media people
can spread awareness about important events and that is why they try to target
those activists and arrest them, just like they do to women in Saudi Arabia. In
Saudi Arabia in particular where women are not aloud to speak up in public,
they use social media as there "freedom" space where they can express
themselves freely, but now they need to think twice before there are able to
voice there opinion in fear of the government looking over there shoulder to
see what they are writing.

I think that this issue should be addressed, the whole purpose of
oppressing regimes is to inflect fear into the citizens, fear of being caught
and punished, but with social media people were able to fulfill one of there
most basic rights as humans, freedom of speech. But now when people are able to
voice there opinions (i.e Egypt), oppressing governments understand that its
dangerous for there survival as a regime to let that situation continue, so
they are trying to shut down one of the most basic rights humans have. We cant
let that happen, every human being should have the right to voice his opinion
and social media helps people do just that